Your rights under the Jones Act.

The Jones Act, passed by Congress in 1920, gives injured seamen rights that no other American worker has. Longshoremen have the LHWCA. Everyone else has state workers' compensation. Seamen alone have the Jones Act — and with it, a combination of statutory and common-law remedies that routinely produce recoveries ten, twenty, or fifty times what workers' compensation would pay for the same injury.

Three of the four rights are yours regardless of fault. Even if the injury was entirely your own doing, maintenance, cure, and unearned wages are still owed to you. The fourth — negligence damages — does require showing the employer or the vessel did something wrong, but the bar for showing it is deliberately low.

What follows is the plain-English version of each right. What it is. What it's worth. What companies typically get wrong about it, and what you should insist on.

Maintenance is a daily cash payment that covers your living expenses — food and lodging, essentially — while you're off work recovering from a maritime injury. It's owed from the day you can't work because of the injury, and it continues until you reach maximum medical improvement, which is the point at which further medical treatment is unlikely to make you better.

Here's what matters about maintenance: it's yours, regardless of whether the injury was your fault, the company's fault, or nobody's fault. It's a no-fault benefit. If you qualify as a seaman and you got hurt aboard or in the service of the vessel, your employer owes it.

How much is maintenance worth?

This is where companies get aggressive. Many union contracts and employment agreements specify a maintenance rate — often a figure like $8, $15, or $30 per day. These rates are often decades out of date, and courts in most jurisdictions will set them aside in favor of your actual reasonable living expenses.

What counts: rent or mortgage payment, utilities, groceries. What doesn't: car payments, insurance, credit card bills, entertainment, anything that isn't strictly food and lodging. In most parts of the country, a fair maintenance rate for a seaman recovering at home is in the range of $35 to $65 per day. In higher-cost areas, it's more.

When maintenance stops.

Maintenance ends when you reach maximum medical improvement — not when you feel better, not when the insurance company says so, and not when you return to any kind of work. If you go back to light duty but are still recovering, maintenance can continue. If the employer cuts you off before MMI is properly established, that cutoff is often the basis for a separate claim for willful and wanton failure to pay.

Cure is the right to have your medical bills paid — in full — by your employer, until you reach maximum medical improvement. Hospital bills, surgery, physical therapy, prescription medications, specialist consultations, follow-up appointments, adaptive equipment, travel to and from treatment. All of it.

Like maintenance, cure is no-fault. It doesn't matter whose fault the injury was. If you're a seaman hurt in service of the vessel, your employer owes you cure.

You choose the doctor.

This is critical, and it's where companies most often cross the line. The employer does not get to pick your doctor. You do. The "company doctor" — the physician the employer sends you to, often a contracted occupational-health provider — does not have the final word on your diagnosis, your treatment plan, or when you've reached MMI.

You can see the company doctor if you want. You can also ignore them entirely. You can get a second opinion from a doctor of your choice, and the employer is required to pay for it. You can get a third. The law does not require you to accept the treatment or timeline the company doctor recommends.

In most Jones Act cases, the company doctor is the employer's most useful witness — the one who conveniently finds the worker fit for duty weeks before an independent doctor would. Knowing this from day one is worth thousands of dollars in settlement value.

What MMI actually means.

Maximum medical improvement is not "you feel okay now." It's the point at which further medical treatment is not reasonably expected to improve your condition. A back injury that has plateaued at chronic pain has reached MMI. A back injury still improving with physical therapy has not. A torn rotator cuff awaiting surgery has not. An amputee fitted with a prosthetic and adapted to it has reached MMI for the amputation, but may still be in the middle of additional treatment for related conditions.

MMI is a medical judgment, made by a qualified doctor, based on your actual condition. Not a calendar date. Not a decision the employer's adjuster gets to make.

If you're hurt during your hitch, voyage, or contract period, your employer owes you the wages you would have earned through the end of that period. Not just the wages you'd already worked for. The full remainder.

This is the right that most employers pretend doesn't exist, and it's the one that most often adds up to five- or six-figure sums on its own. If you were six weeks into a twelve-week hitch on an offshore rig making $1,500 a day, and you got hurt and couldn't finish the hitch, the unearned wages for the remaining six weeks are owed to you — roughly $63,000 in this example, before overtime.

What counts as a "voyage" or "hitch"?

For deep-sea workers, the "voyage" is typically the round trip — dock to dock. For offshore workers on rotation, the "hitch" is the scheduled period of duty, often 14 days on / 14 days off or 21/21. For fishermen, it's typically the season or the specific fishing trip. For inland tug crews, it's usually the assigned rotation.

The practical rule: if there was a definable period of work you were scheduled to complete, and the injury prevented you from completing it, the wages for that period are unearned wages owed to you.

The first three rights — maintenance, cure, unearned wages — are the no-fault benefits that come with being a seaman. They're significant, but they cap out at relatively predictable numbers.

The fourth right is different. It's a right to sue your employer — or the vessel itself — for negligence, and to recover the full damages that result: past and future medical expenses, past and future lost earnings, pain and suffering, loss of earning capacity, and more. This is where Jones Act cases most often reach six and seven figures.

The "slightest negligence" standard.

In most personal-injury cases, you have to show the defendant's negligence was a substantial cause of your injury. The Jones Act uses a deliberately lower standard: the employer's negligence only needs to have played any part, however small, in bringing about the injury.

This standard, sometimes called "featherweight causation," is unique to the Jones Act and the Federal Employers' Liability Act (which the Jones Act borrows its framework from). It was designed by Congress to make it easier for seamen and railroad workers — two of the most dangerous occupations in the country — to recover when they got hurt.

In practical terms: if the vessel had a known equipment problem, if the crew was understaffed, if training was inadequate, if a policy was violated, if any safety measure that would have prevented or reduced the injury wasn't taken — you can probably recover.

Unseaworthiness: a separate cause of action.

Alongside the Jones Act negligence claim, seamen also have a separate claim for "unseaworthiness" — a general maritime law doctrine that makes the vessel owner strictly liable for any condition of the vessel that makes it unfit for its intended purpose. This is a no-fault claim against the vessel (technically, against its owner), and it covers everything from defective equipment to untrained crew to inadequate safety gear.

An unseaworthiness claim can be brought alongside the Jones Act claim — the same lawsuit typically includes both — and in many cases it's the unseaworthiness theory that ultimately produces the recovery, even when Jones Act negligence is harder to prove.

What "full damages" actually means.

Unlike workers' compensation, which pays a scheduled amount based on your body part and your weekly wage, the Jones Act lets you recover for every economic and non-economic consequence of the injury:

Past medical expenses. Every bill from every provider, paid.

Future medical expenses. Projected cost of ongoing treatment, including surgeries you'll need later, physical therapy, medication, and adaptive equipment. Calculated by medical and economic experts.

Past lost wages. The income you would have earned from the injury through the verdict or settlement, including overtime and bonuses you would have received.

Future lost wages and diminished earning capacity. If you can't return to the work you were doing — or can't return to work at all — the law recognizes the career you lost. For a thirty-year-old deckhand making $90,000 a year who can no longer go to sea, this single category is often millions of dollars.

Pain and suffering. Physical pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life. Not available in workers' comp. Often a major component of Jones Act recoveries.

Loss of consortium. In many jurisdictions, your spouse has a separate claim for the loss of companionship and support caused by the injury.

Putting it all togetherHow the four rights work in practice.

A typical serious Jones Act injury — say, a lower-back injury requiring surgery, on an offshore supply vessel deckhand making $85,000 a year — might produce something like this:

Maintenance at $45 per day for eight months of recovery: roughly $10,800. Cure covering surgery, two months of physical therapy, prescriptions, and follow-up: roughly $85,000 in medical bills paid. Unearned wages through the end of the 28-day hitch the seaman was injured during: roughly $6,500. And then the negligence claim: past and future medical totaling $150,000, past and future lost wages totaling $350,000, pain and suffering in the range of $400,000 to $800,000.

Total potential recovery: somewhere between $900,000 and $1.3 million, depending on the strength of the negligence case, the venue, and the specific facts.

Compare that to workers' compensation in most states for the same injury: weekly benefits capped at a state maximum, typically producing a lifetime recovery in the $50,000 to $150,000 range, with no pain and suffering, no full medical, no unearned wages.

That factor-of-ten difference is not an exaggeration. It's the Jones Act doing what Congress built it to do — treating the men and women who work at sea with the seriousness the work deserves.